Mailer makes a good although inductive case for how Adolph’s father was at least possibly the father of Adolph’s mother, although she only thought of and knew of him as her uncle. Like many of Mailer’s assertions in the novel this idea proves to be original, at least possible, and supported by at least a few references. (The back of the novel is type-heavy with a bibliography.} Other of Mailer’s ideas are less possible and a few patently untrue. That Adolph had one testicle was rumored but not true. That his sister Paula was mentally retarded is untrue. But what what does seem true are the influences that in one boy could have simply been ripples in the sea of being raised but, in Adi’s case, became tidal waves dashing him into the future -- many such waves of course were helped to roll in and break on the boy by Dieter.

Alois Hitler, Adolph’s father. is really the protagonist of this novel and the story would be his except for what we know from outside the novel about Adolph’s future. Alois is incestuous, a womanizer, a respected and truly honest Customs official, and a social climber. Oh, and an amateur beekeeper. If this novel has a weakness it is the prolific, never-ending details of beekeeping that I at least found to be way too much information and not truly necessary to the development of story or characters. That aside, Mailer is a master of prose and the novel flows naturally as the boy Adi appears and moves through the story’s main events as one tiny thread in the plot. But he is the thread upon which the warp and woof of all other threads in this tapestry hang.

 

We see Adi’s first look at violence. Alois beats his dog who has peed in the house. In the boy’s look “there was no tenderness but much comprehension.” Then we see that he is taken later to play with other boys and with his older brother’s protection joins in on war games in the forest, and later the devil Dieter helps to strengthen him so that he does not cry out when hit. In this type of way we watch as Adi’s parents and family members develop and we see their attitudes toward Adi change and how those attitudes work on Adolph.

 

 

Dieter is hardly all-powerful and Mailer makes his unstated point that while devils may be involved they cannot take all the credit. Indeed, Mailer has a hierarchy of Hell vs. Heaven that makes C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape seem like a most minor functionary. The Evil One issues orders to Dieter and is present through Dieter at Adolph’s conception. The “Dumbkopff,” (God) and his “Cudgels,” (Angels) seem far less than either omnipresent or omniprescient in this book.

 

I think the final chapter of the book is a first in literature. The chapter entitled “The Castle in the Forest” purports to explain what the title of the book means. Other reviewers have accepted and repeated the explanation in that chapter that “The Castle” was a title given to a very non-castle-like concentration camp by the inmates and is thus an illustrative example of the irony that prevailed in the German mind. But to take Mailer at his word here is, I think, to allow for a deliberate misleading because Mailer is toying here with his reader.

 

Call-outs on a photograph are very familiar to all of us. A call-out is an explanatory word often on a white, opaque background superimposed on a photograph or diagram with an arrow pointing to what is being explained. Most often call-outs are what they should be -- informative and useful. But if a call-out is placed improperly by accident or by design it can actually cover up an area of the photograph and hide from the viewer a fact that would otherwise be easily seen.

 

 

Throughout the book there are many images of Adi and forests. From playing wargames to masturbating in the leaves there are numerous boreal instances. But I believe the key to the veil that Mailer has placed at the end of this novel occurs when Adi joins the boy’s chorus at a Benedictine Abbey.

 

“Over the entrance to the monastery was a large swastika carved into the stone of the arched gate.” Our devil narrator Dieter is quick to say, “Not too much.... should be made of this.” and details it as being only a remnant from an old coat of arms. But, Dieter is a devil. Should we take his word? Besides, the swastika symbol pre-dates many devils.

 

So nine-year old Adi is now in touch with his symbol and in a short scene dons his sister’s darkest dress and standing on a stool speaks a sermon he has heard and and a long prayer. As he decants he “was absorbing these sounds and relishing the moment when he would be alone in the forest speaking to the trees.”

 

Adi who during the novel has fortified himself with thick walls of ego and emotion against the outside world; Adi who imagines himself as imposing and impregnable; Adi  who builds daydream castles in the air of his future; it is Adi who is the Castle. And the trees? The silent trees surrounding Adi, listening to him as he orates and spews his passion upon them, they are a forest of those he will mislead.

 

So we pierce here the veil of the final chapter and we see that Mailer has written more than a history, more than an often-brilliant novel. He has written a hidden message that we as today’s forest might do well to break our rooted stances to attend.  

 

 

THE CASTLE IN THE FOREST by Norman Mailer is published by Random House $27.95 Hardcover.

  

The guardian devil is named Dieter and as the novel begins he reveals that during the War and Hitler’s actual rise to power he inhabited the body of an SS trooper. But the novel which begins years before Adolph’s birth happens for the most part while Dieter is not yet embodied.

 

The novel begins by investigating the incestuous possibilities of Adolph’s ancestry. For the Devil (Dieter’s superior who may or may not be Satan) believes that “incestuaries” make the best clients. More than the first quarter of the novel is set amongst the rough-hewn and incestuous people of the time and region, two of whom would become Adolph’s parents.